Welcome

Inside each and every one of us is more power and capability than we know. The last few years have been ones of incredible personal growth for me on this front and simultaneously society as a whole seems to be going through this same transition. My goal here at Damsel NOT in Distress is for you (yes, you) to realize just how powerful you are, how capable you can be, and how expansive life can feel when you move beyond your limits.

Welcome to Team Damsel NOT in Distress

I’d mudded sheetrock before. I’d hung it before with help. The whole house needed to be done, flooring needed to be laid, and cabinets painted. I held my brand new drill and told myself that I could, in fact, do this.

I was in a drive through at a bank, 350 miles from home, and heard a clunk. I could turn left but I couldn’t turn right. I pulled into a parking spot, shook the wheel and heard a much bigger clunk. Armed with Youtube and basic tools and a surplus of stubbornness I decided to get myself back on the road.

In the midst of divorcing, while much of my life felt out of my control, I seized that control in projects, vehicle maintenance, and long term plans. I dropped some plates and balanced many more. I began to use the hashtag, #damselNOTindistress on Instagram. Owning that seemed to give me a place to be bold, to do things that I had been pretty regularly told that I couldn’t do. I did more and that only inspired me to push myself to do even more.

Several of my friends have picked up the hashtag and used it for everything from hanging curtain rods to unclogging dishwashers, and tackling travel trailer renovation projects. However, the idea of “Damsel NOT in Distress” feels larger to me than that. It is women taking ownership of their lives, and perhaps even more so, the world around then in all sorts of ways and harnessing their inner power and strength to make that happen.

I originally launched my blog in 2011 to document my life as a partnered woman, and in retrospect, I let that partnership define me. My journey to embracing my own being and strengths (and weaknesses becoming strengths) has been halting at times but life changing and bracing. While I plan to continue to document my own #damselNOTindistress moments in this space, I also want to use this space to amplify the voices of other women living their damn lives to the fullest.

To that end, use the hashtag to share your #damselNOTindistress moments and those that you find in this vast internet space. Tweet stories you read to me so I can share them with you all. I’m toying with a link-round up once a week to share things I’ve found with my readers but I’m open to other suggestions and totally welcome input from the world of other damsels (or dames, if you prefer) who are NOT in distress.

You, yes, you, are part of Team #damselNOTinDistress. What will you do?

Blog

My blog is desperately behind and I’m basically just going to start with the current moment but I have a couple of things I want to document on here… one of which is that I ran my first ultra-marathon back in November! Katie and Georgie talked me into signing up and I felt like a …

So, along the way, I got talked into running the Dead Horse 50K next month in Moab [I’m sucking so much at blogging… Dead Horse was now over a month ago]. By the time my birthday “run” was over it was time to actually go out and do some running. To help myself out, I …

Hallelujah it was better than 2016 & 2017. Peakbagging: Although 23 peaks is my second lowest summits since 2014, reaching them involved 47,500′ of elevation gain, the second highest gain since 2014. I simply did most of my climbing here at home which makes for lots of elevation gain. I added seven county highpoints to …